Everything You Know Is Wrong
by Argentine Rose
Summary: A simple errand to buy a book of poems leads Marius to a most peculiar reunion, and to the realisation that several things in his past weren't quite as he'd believed them to be.
1. A Wild Book Chase

"_Pale eyed Milady with the auburn hair_

_Sad eyed Milady with the noble heart"_

It was not, in the great scheme of things, a lot to go on. Oh and the poet was called Jean. Was _possibly_ called Jean – there was an outside chance, Cosette had told him, that it might have been Jerome.

"Well then", thought Marius with a sort of weary determination, "Well then my Monsieur Chose – baptismal name _possibly _Jean – author of an unnamed volume of poems published within the past six months _possibly_ to critical acclaim and containing a verse entitled "To Which Ardent and Noble Lady?" Well then, let's be having you! You'd better be good though, you just better had be!"

If asked, Marius would have admitted that he was in no mood for a wild goose chase. However, he would also have admitted that Cosette was by no means the sort of wife who habitually set her husband Herculean tasks in the name of love, something all too common amongst the wives of their circle – the degree of difficulty and pointlessness of the task being somehow seen as reliable indicator of the ardour of the man accomplishing it. A month since, she had come home from a salon entranced – unable to remember the poet's name because he had made her cry so. Marius had heard her dreamily mouthing such lines as she could remember to herself in the drawing room when she imagined herself alone. He had teased her and then they had together determined that he would try to find a volume by the mysterious scribe who had so touched her heart.

Girding his loins, he stepped into the bookshop.

Motes of dust gavotted in the afternoon sunlight and the stock was arranged in the most haphazard manner imaginable. Here and there a desultory effort had been made at sorting the items into some semblance of order on the shelves – for a while they would present, for example, a neatly alphabetised collection of English novels, but these would soon be routed by an abandoned collection of treatises on architecture or some books of 16th century verse which someone had decided they did not wish to purchase after all and dumped. Some of the tomes were laid out on tables, and here too some poor beleaguered soul had clearly attempted to order them into neat stacks. Entropy and fashionable ennui had caused these stacks to disintegrate until they more closely resembled rolling, ever shifting sand dunes of paper. One would have had to be as intrepid as a Bedouin to cross these wastes in search of a desired volume.

There was, Marius mused, something contrived about the place's down at heel, slovenly air. The owner was clearly the sort of tiresome intellectual who considered himself very smart – but completely above being seen to be smart, much less the notion that he might want to sell some books or that other people might enter the shop wanted to by some. The groups of self consciously, pretentiously Bohemian young men gossiping and laughing in the shadows advertised that this was a place where people who thought themselves very clever came to show off that fact, and where the idea that someone might want to walk in off the street with the sole aim or finding a particular tome as quickly as possible, purchase it and then leave with it was inexpressibly vulgar.

Marius, who spoke three languages and was a trained and now occasionally practising lawyer, did not consider himself clever at all and found such places a trial. He always experienced a revival of that paranoia he had been prey to when very poor that people were laughing at him. These haunts of Bohemian sophistry had been just about bearable in his student days when he could come in a pack with Courfeyrac, Jehan and Bossuet so that, together, they could snigger away their discomfit. Now, however . . . .

Still.

He heaved a sigh and, with little hope in his heart, strode off to where he assumed modern poetry might be, past a pair of callow young things, one of whom was shouting loudly, "Well, Blondet says!" He had to physically shove past the fatter of the two blades, who was wearing a ridiculous goose-shit-green topcoat, since he was so engrossed in explaining whatever it was that Blondet had to say about something or other that he had not heard Marius ask him politely, thrice, to step aside. This caused him to drop copious amounts of ash from his cigarillo over his preposterous jacket and he turned and called after Marius in a drawling voice, "Hiy! You Sir – watch what you're about! Yes, you in the unfashionable hat, Sir

In times gone by such an insult would have provoked Courfeyrac to a scathing jacket based witticism and Bahorel to drag the fellow outside "To account for himself like a man". Marius simply glared at him, turned away and then recalled a long forgotten memory of the curmedgeonly old police inspector at rue Pontoise who had been wont to cram his greatcoat pockets full of small arms. "I might take to doing that," Marius thought, "Then next time I am in a situation like this I can shoot the fool – or, on reflection, myself! Now, on with finding the book . . ."

Striding off, Marius found himself making an extended wrong turn around a series of trestles loaded with fat political biographies and dusty volumes on military history where he ended up tripping over a grizzled man in a voluminous greatcoat (he noted that most large bookshops seemed to have a man like this, a veteran of the Grande Armée who could_** e**_qually well be a veteran of Agincourt or Troy – perpetually searching for something no book could contain). The old soldier glowered at him and grunted, miming the rattling of an imaginary sabre.

Marius strode away and the old soldier returned to disconsolately perusing the books in front of him

Exasperated, he leant on the shelf behind him and looked down at his feet. There, battered, forlorn and abandoned lay a slim tome – "To Which Ardent and Noble Lady And Other Verses" by Jean-Joseph Rougemont.

"Oh Gently Mother Mary," Marius breathed, stooping to retrieve the book and dashing headlong to the counter in one clumsy hurried movement, "Thank you! Than you! Thank you!"


	2. O Fair Who Holds My Heart

"He **sang** as if he knew me

In all my dark despair.

And then he looked right through me

As if I wasn't there"

Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, _Killing Me Softly With His Song _

Marius bore his hard won volume of poems home in triumph that evening, and celebrated by pouring Cosette a glass of Parfait d'Amour with Champagne, a drink to which she had been introduced by some of the more 'sophisticated' ladies of her circle (Marius was incapable of naming them sophisticated without adding, if only mentally, this distancing 'quote, unquote'). After dinner he had read aloud to her the whole of _'To Which Ardent and Noble Lady'_

He was instantly able to understand why the poem had held Cosette in such thrall – its subject being a young and beautiful woman, auburn of hair and pale of complexion, who was waiting in a garden, overgrown to fairytale proportions, for a man she loved dearly and who never seemed to arrive. He felt (privately) that it was very similar to, and compared poorly with, Tennyson's recent _Mariana_, which he had purchased in the English with a view to translating it (he found that his old habits as a literary translation 'devil' died hard).

Later in the evening, when Cosette had fallen asleep in front of the fire repeatedly and had finally been shepherded to bed by mother hen Toussaint and, finding he had nothing much to do and little desire to sleep, Marius began to peruse the slim volume in more detail. The first view poems were disappointing – an ode to this or that figure of classical antiquity, a paean to the beauty of this lady or that landscape. All to Marius's mind, more or less sub Hugolian and sub-sub Wordsworthian riffs upon the fashionable Romantic school. Utterly unoriginal. Pretty parlour pieces to delight half educated ladies barely out of the convent, but little more.

But then a little poem caught his eye. It was scarcely a page long and entitled '_Found Drowned'_, a name taken from those sad little notices posted in newspapers and police stations whenever the body of some poor careless or despairing soul was recovered, half rotten, from the waters of the Seine. This poem was as different from its predecessors as eau de vie from milk, describing tersely one such a recovery without even troubling to identify the sex or age of the deceased, only dwelling upon the emotional horror and physical revulsion which such a death must inspire. From this Marius concluded that the poet was probably a rather bleak individual. Rather bleak and rather strange.

Marius read on. The poet, this enigmatic Jean Joseph Rougemont, finally obliquely revealed some biographical information. He extrapolated from several verses – most of them witty and frivolous commentaries upon Parisian life – that the poet was of Marius's approximate age, a rough contemporary of his student years and one who held, or at least had held, views which were at the revolutionary end of liberal.

"I could have sat next to him in my classes and never known it!" Marius mused ruefully, and he fell to wondering which of the half remembered, eager faces that had daily crowded the benches around him might have been earnestly scribbling villanelles rather than taking down Blondeau's interminable lectures.

Rougemont's political sympathies were confirmed, to Marius' mind, by an elegy entitled '_Bury Me In Summer'_, ostensibly about the death of a single much missed friend, but easy to interpret – for anyone with the knowledge – as being really about the lost students of the summer of 1832.

"Aha!", Marius though, "so here we have a young man of my age, a none too serious young man to judge from most of his output, who has abandoned his law to pen parlour games for ladies, but who is, never-the-less, still troubled by his past and the losses he finds whenever he examines it."

This Marius could understand, and he almost found it in his heart to like the young poet who had put him to so much trouble.

Turning the page, however, he was to find something altogether more troubling. It was the poem on page 52 of the volume, one of those Mock Medieval efforts then much in vogue in poetic and artistic circles entitled '_O Fair who holds my heart – or, verses after Tabouret"_

The first stanza ran thus:

O Fair who holds my heart

Prisoner with a look.

Who with one gracious smile

My soul as captive took

To my aid must you fly

Or, Lady, I must die.

Innocuous enough to a casual reader – only a poem, and a rather silly one at that! Still, it made Marius feel weak with a sort of horrified amazement. He had read this poem before – not Tabouret's original. This one. Well, he had read Tabouret's original too, but it was this one that stuck in his mind. He knew just who had written it – hell he could remember being there when it was written! They had crowded round the little corner table at the Cafe Musain, determined to be irritating, suggesting rhymes and words (some more sensible and more decent that others) and asking just what the point of re-writing a poem that someone else had already done was anyway? Eventually Grantaire had drunkenly spilled a pichet of wine over the manuscript and Bahorel and Bossuet had dragging him outside, squealing and laughing, and ducked him in a horse trough 'to sober him up'. They had all trouped outside to watch and had found it very funny but when they had come back in, breathless and splashed, Jehan had picked up his papers and gone. They had supposed they'd offended him as he did not reappear in the cafe for several days. When he did come back, however, he was just as gentle, diffident and warm as ever and the first thing he did was hand Joly a poem he had promised to write on his behalf to Musichetta 'as flowers weren't getting him anywhere'

Instantly Marius found himself, without reason, overcome with a sick feeling of foreknowing – as if he had lost his footing at the top of a steep flight of stairs and knew that he would be powerless to either regain his footing of break his fall. Slowly, he turned the page and read these words:

'To Musichetta'

For a moment Marius could feel the blood rush in his ears and a dancing pattern of phosphorescent spots and lambent tiger stripes flashed up before his eyes. "What?" he mouthed, shaking his head, "What?"

But, after, all the hour was late – he had merely drunk a little too much brandy and was being ridiculous. After all, how many girls out there went by the sobriquet of Musichetta? And how many silly young men indulged in a spot of nostalgic Medievalism? To lay the ghost he turned the page again.

"Do you recall how life was kind

When youth and hope still filled out breast,

And we'd no other thought in mind

Than to be lovers and well dressed?"

Another of Jehan's – he'd always said that, when he was an old man he'd like to be able to read it to the wife he hadn't met yet sat before the fire. Marius laughed convulsively, shivering, as he did so. "Well, that worked – laying the ghost! Brilliant! What _is_ this? What is this diabolical book?" He turned the page again, his movements clumsy with haste and agitation. There were a couple more stupid poems about women, which calmed him a little. And then, the final poem '_Phoebus Apollo and his Lieutenants'._

"A classical allegory! Thank God!"Marius exclaimed, and was sorely tempted to throw the book across the room and forget that the horrid thing had ever existed. His eye, however, was drawn inexorably back to the page open in his lap. Phoebus Apollo was described as having "The untamed beauty of a girl – lip curled in disdain" and "a forehead like the horizon" who "Used flowers to conceal his sword", The Phoebus Apollo, bringing light with him, had two principal lieutenants – the one "a gentle, earnest guide" the other "a stout and merry friend to all" He was also attended by a drunken and maudlin Bacchus, a warm and working class Vulcan "skilled with his hands" and a young Aesculapius who spend most of his time diagnosing his own ailments! Beneath the classical guff Marius was amazed and dismayed – yet perversely pleased – but mostly baffled, baffled and disturbed, to recognise the friends of his youth. When he read about a young man following the group "Black of hair and lived pale" "Napoleon's last gentle eagle, dreaming through the rack of France" and recognised his youthful self, summed up and dismissed in a pen portrait lasting barely a stanza, he finally threw the book behind an ottoman and strode out the door, spending most of the night walking very fast through the streets of the Marais trying very hard to think of nothing much at all.

When he finally returned home and fell asleep Marius experienced the most peculiar dream.

In his dream he was by the sea, the Mediterranean Sea with clear blue water and blinding white hot light streaming down. In the water he could see all his friends floating – but they weren't dead, far from it, although there was definitely something uncanny about them. They seemed quite at home in the sea, treading water lazily, the skirts of their frock coats billowing out nonchalantly in the water like a shoal of mermaids in top hats. On a rock, watching them all, basked Enjolras. He was covered with seaweed which Marius noticed was, comically, red, white and blue and his face and figure seemed strangely androgynous – he could easily have been taken for a woman had Marius not known otherwise. And yet to call this figure either a man or a woman seemed altogether too normal – he was altogether too otherworldly for that. He was combing his hair and smiling down benignly. Just next to the rock he noticed M. Mabeuf being splashed by Eponine Jondrette's brother. And there was Eponine Jondrette herself – being a mermaid suited her – dragging along the old police inspector from the rue Pontoise. "Javert! " Marius thought, "Why on earth do I remember his name – maybe it's because I still have his pistols". Behind them he could see Cosette's poor dead father and they called out to him, their voices inexpressibly beautiful and not at all like life, but they didn't call him by his real name but Urbain Fabre! "Urbain Fabre!" they called and as he swam aside Marius saw another figure which he recognised – and even in his dream he worried he might be going mad – recognised from portraits as his own dead mother. Behind her were dozens, hundreds of people he did not know, serenely floating with skirts and hair wafting in the water, stretching out dizzyingly to the horizon. Marius forced himself to look back towards the shore, to the solid ground at his feet, but as he did so someone caught his eye. Jehan. He smiled at Marius and then said in that soft, shy voice of his "Come on in, the water's lovely"


	3. In which Marius begins his investigation

**You're so vain you probably think this song is about you"**

** Carly Simon, **_**You're So Vain**_

The following morning and the book remained behind the ottoman, and Marius awoke feeling rather foolish. He sat up in bed while Cosette flitted about the room in her peignoir, stroking his moustache and wondering if he was losing his reason. Or, given the literary nature of his paranoia, losing the plot. He admitted to himself that he had been seriously shaken by the strange volume the previous evening – there had been something in it which had reached out in an insidious and unwelcome manner to parts of his mind he had hitherto tried his best to leave unexplored and undisturbed. But what was it that he had been keeping repressed? Grief at the passing of his friends and fear at how very nearly he had joined them? Certainly, that was easy to accept – he had tried never to dwell on his sadness for his friends but had always accepted it as a companion. Courfeyrac in particular he missed every day. Guilt, that he was a baron with 60, 000 francs, a pretty wife and a beating heart where poor Armand de Courfeyrac had the clothes he'd been buried in and, if God were just, a seat in the Kingdom of Heaven (where he would certainly be bored!). True – unbearable but undeniable. Beyond guilt there was – nostalgia, not just for the company of his friends but for his life as a student (very little of which he had consciously enjoyed at the time). Unbelievable that as a paid up and happily married member of the bon ton he might miss old sketchy, shitty life back in Saint Marcel but he did! He also had to admit – and this pushed him to a point almost beyond embarrassment – that he was, at heart, a superstitious man with a primitive, latent belief in the power of the dead to leave a little something of themselves behind.

"Well," Marius thought, "Now I am getting somewhere – at least I know why I might hate the nasty little volume. Not that it explains where in Hell it came from."

At this moment, with a loud rumble from his stomach, Marius' body reminded him that it had been forced to be up walking half the night and that, if he insisted in continuing his half baked detective work it would need breakfast before it could play along. Further thought without a cup of coffee was impossible.

Fortified by breakfast and seated in his study, Marius considered his various options with regards to _To Which Ardent and Noble Lady_ and came up with the following:

First: It was truly the work of a disturbed revenant seeking literary recognition from beyond the grave – hugely worrying, hugely unlikely, all a bit Hamlet Prince of Denmark.

Second: Someone had found Jehan's poems and published them under a pseudonym, believing them worthy of recognition. The most likely option – but hadn't Cosette said that the reading had been given by the poet himself?

Third: Someone had found Jehan's poems and published them as their own – Equally plausible. What a bastard!

Fourth: Any resemblance to persons living or dead was purely coincidental and Marius has imagined the whole thing because he was either drunk, or an egomaniac, or losing his mind – almost the most preferable option, all told.

Maybe he should leave things at that? Accept that last night's silliness was nothing but the product of a noxious combination of unresolved grief, an overactive imagination (on his part) an underactive imagination (on the part of the possibly not very talented Rougemont) and too much brandy.

But if the poems were indeed those of Jean Prouvaire, published by an unknown hand? What them? If they had been published as an act of altruism he would like to find and shake the hand of the man or woman who had allowed his poor friend a long shot at immortality. If they had been plagiarised for personal gain, well . . . he could think of something else he'd like to do to them!

It was clear to him that he must find out the answer and then put the whole silly business to one side.

Marius had never been much of a detective or, indeed, much of a man of action but it was clear even to him where he had to begin.

He donned his coat and left the house. The offending volume remained behind the ottoman where he had flung it.


	4. The Pursuit of Knowledge

**A/N : All I can do is apologise for the exceptional silliness of this – I blame the episodes of Spaced I watched beforehand. And yes, the fool in the terrible coat is deliberately named for the author of **_**Cosette, Or The Time of Illusions**_** – what a stupid, stupid book that was!**

"**LeFou I'm afraid I've been thinking – "**

" – **A dangerous pastime!"**

"**I know!"**

**Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast**

The bookshop where Marius had originally purchased _To Which Ardent and Noble Lady_ was situated at the end of a narrow blind alley deep in the Latin Quarter which stank of piss and cigarillos, and where it always seemed overcast and about to rain, no matter how gay the weather in the rest of the city. Marius now made his way down this sinister cul-de-sac with unusual slowness. Partly this was to avoid soiling his shoes with the umpteen varieties of unspeakable substances that belched up from a blocked gutter (clearly there was a lazy inspector at work on this beat – or one with no sense of smell!). Partly it was due to his mounting feelings of trepidation. He walked forward with his hat in his hands and his lips pursed, like a man groping his way into a cave to visit the Cumaean Sibyl

"Oh for goodness sake you stupid man!" he exclaimed to himself, "It's only a bloody bookshop!"

He quickened his pace, but this only resulted in his having to perform a little hop, skip and dance over the bloated bodies of a family of drowned cats.

"And next time you come here, you wear top boots rather than shoes!"

Although the Lord Almighty only knew that he hoped there wouldn't be a next time! He was going to make one last trip to the Pantheon of Pretentiousness at the end of this fetid alleyway, then head on to the offices of the _Moniteur_. This would hopefully provide all the information he would need to conclude this matter to his own satisfaction – after that, he had promised himself, he would never again read anything more recent than Racine!

Full of this manly resolution, he pushed open the bookshop door forcefully, without noticing that there was someone standing just behind it who gave a pained, almost canine, yelp as he was send flying into a trestle of pamphlets which was brought down by his weight. The weight of a young man in a . . . goose-shit green coat (complete with a small and fetching ash stain on the left lapel). Oh God!

"You!" Marius exclaimed, shocked and irrationally convinced, in his state of sleep deprivation and heightened emotion, that the young dandy was completely in the wrong in the matter because . . . well, because he existed!

"You!" responded the young man in his turn, equally aggrieved (and rather more legitimately too, given that Marius had knocked him down and destroyed his favourite jacket inside of a week)

"You!" Marius said again, rather stupidly this time, wholly unable to process this turn of events. Once again his mind flashed back to old Javert and his coat pocket arsenal. Javert , in his turn, lead onto last night's nocturnal hallucination of seaweed robed Enjolras basking like a shag on a rock, and Marius started to laugh, quite involuntarily.

The young dandy, still sprawled in the remains of the trestle, looked at him in disbelief, and his face coloured brick red with embarrassment and affronted masculine pride.

"You! You . . . ! You _coquin_! You cheeky bloody blighter!" he roared, leaping up from the wreckage of the trestle and grabbing Marius by the lapels – inadvertently propelling both of them into another table. It stood up to the weight of the two men, but disgorged a shower of books and sheet music almost as if they had jumped into a pond.

Marius lat on the table with Goose-Shit Green still clutching his lapels on top of him, firmly convinced he was about to receive the mother of all smacks in the mouth. It never came. Instead the two men looked into each other's faces and it dawned on them both that this hadn't really been meant to happen, and that the bookshop was utterly, horribly silent. And that everyone was staring at them.

Animosity vanished from both their countenances as they realised that they were now temporary partners in crime in what could most optimistically be described as 'a terrible scene'.

At that moment two men dragged Marius and Goose-Shit-Green of the table and to their feet. They were both handsome men – pale and dark haired and both wearing black frock coats.

"Oh Ceresa!" admonished the shorter of the two men, a young fellow with a high forehead and the unselfconscious ease of a wealth gentleman, "Just what was that in aide of?"

"Yes," echoed the taller man, glaring at the first as if peeved at being relegated to the role of second fiddle in this conversation, "Just what the fuck was that about?"

This fellow was more classically handsome that the first, but older, with black circles of tiredness under his eyes, more threadbare clothes, and an air of resigned disappointment and irritation. Even to Marius' inexperienced eye there was something about him that smelled strongly of _mouchardage_. That and cheap tobacco.

"What's it to you?" Marius said rudely, and turned back to the green coated Sieur Ceresa. "Sir, shall we take this outside?"

"Not so fast!" barked the older man with an arrogance that could only be official, "I want to know what this is about!"

"Yes – what is going on?" enquired the younger man.

"The other day this Jackanapes ruined my jacket – and just now he sent me flying into that table. I had to give him what for after that!"

"But why?" the dark haired young man enquired in a voice of benign bafflement. "But why couldn't you just forgive him – why this year alone, Ceresa, you've lamed my horse, stolen my mistress and sat on my hat, and I always forgive you!"

"S'pose!" said Ceresa sulkily, and Marius started to wonder whether he wasn't a bit simple.

"Shake like a gentleman?" he said to Marius, which Marius was all too glad to do.

"And now clear out!" said the shabby black haired man.

"We were going to 'clear out' five minutes back – but you stopped us!" exclaimed Marius, irritated out of all patience.

"Watch your tongue, Monsieur!"

"Why?"

"For starters I'm a police officer – "

"Well why don't you do something about the disgusting state of the road outside? I assume this is your section? I nearly drowned in a river of dead cats on the way here!"

"On the way here to start a brawl in a bookshop? What sort of asinine dolt, I ask, starts a brawl in a bookshop?"

"What's your name, officer?"

"Sergeant Auguste Pontellier"

"Of ?"

"Saint Marcel"

"Well, Sergeant Pontellier, why don't you trot off back to Saint Marcel and examine some broken streetlamps or something – only stay the heck out of my way!"

And with that Marius turned on his heel and stepped out of the shop back into the Styx of decomposing felines outside, slamming the door behind him.


End file.
